A lad’s holiday – Corfu 1980, part four

During the boat trip home Steve had managed to fix himself up with a date with a rather posh young lady and her ugly fat friend who was brought along as a shark decoy and so that night for the first night of the holiday we were separated, Steve going off on his date and the three of us making it as far as the closest bar to the villa for some drinking practice.

The night wore on and the beer was flowing well when we met up once again with our friendly Thompsons rep Dennis who unfortunately wasn’t looking as friendly as he usually did as he had a nicely developing black eye and was in rather a foul mood.

He explained that a bar owner further down the coast had asked him to call and see him and during a conversation had accused Dennis of telling his holidaymakers to avoid this particular bar.

In todays era of self-booked holidays on the internet its easy to forget that virtually the only way to go abroad in 1980 was to pick your holiday out of a brochure and then let the tour operator do everything for you. With Thompson Holidays that didn’t only mean organising the flights and accommodation but also organising your entertainment and nights out for the holiday duration as well. The first day meeting with your Thompsons representative was a chance for your rep to flog you all sorts of extra trips and also recommend certain bars to go in for which the rep was usually given a sly backhander by the bar owner.

It seems that our own bubble permed rep had been recommending that holidaymakers did not visit a particular bar as the next door bar had bought his loyalty, the offended bar owner had taken him around the back of his premises and had a couple of local toughs rough him up a bit, that was according to our Dennis anyway, we reckoned he might just have walked into a lamp post while drunk.

Whatever the reason for the black eye we were in party mood and eventually found a local bar that was packed and had loud music playing, it turned into a long, late night and all four of us were very, very intoxicated when the time came to climb the mountain to find our villa. Dennis followed us because he was completely incapable of remembering who he was let alone where he was staying for the holiday season, he followed us back to our villa, came in with us and promptly fell asleep on Steves bed, which wasn’t so much of a problem because we reckoned that Steve would be lucky that night and would not be returning to the villa.

I was awoken the following morning by Steve shaking my foot, I was fully clothed and laid on my bed in exactly the same position that I’d fallen on it at some point during the early hours of the morning, I felt like shit.

Steve on the other hand seemed as fresh as a daisy, if not just a little bit agitated, I opened one bleary eye and asked him what time it was but he’d gone into the corridor kitchen to make some toast, I got up a few minutes later and sat at the table in the corridor waiting for him to pour me a cup of coffee.

I asked how his night had gone and he indicated a thumbs down, adding that his date was a stuck up posh cow who had fixed up the date so that her ugly friend might score with Steve, mind it took him all night and lots of drachmas from our kitty to find that out and he’d come home sometime after we’d arrived home to find the front door locked.

None of us had actually thought about the fact that there was only one key to the villa and after banging on the door for twenty minutes Steve realised that he was locked out. Walking around to the side of the villa he noticed that our bedroom window, the one in the alleyway that we never closed, was only five feet or so off the floor and so he could easily manage to drag himself up and through it, unfortunately in the dark he had forgotten that Charlies bed was directly under the window and he fell through the opening right on top of Charlie who was by then unconscious to the world.

Steve was laughing almost hysterically while telling this story as Charlie had told us for several months how he wanted to become a detective in the West Yorkshire Police and we couldn’t help but wonder whether his chances would be affected by having someone break into his bedroom through a window directly above his head and then fall on top of him, and sleep through it all.

Steve explained that he had extricated himself from Charlies bed and then gone into his own bedroom to find, in true Goldilocks fashion, that someone was sleeping in his bed, so he returned to our bedroom and pushed my bed, with me still snoring in it, up against Charlies bed and then climbed in-between us both.

There was a movement in the corridor behind us while Steve was telling the story and we turned to see a dreadful sight. Dennis the Thompsons rep was stood at the bedroom door clad only in his red Thompsons Y front underpants whilst holding his trousers in one hand and his head in the other. He asked what time it was and we told him, he groaned and mumbled that he had a planeload of holidaymakers to meet at the airport in ten minutes, then spent several of those minutes hopping around on one leg trying to get his trousers on.

But it wasn’t just the disheveled state of him that had struck me and Steve dumb, it was the fact that during the night while he was asleep in Steves bed he had vomited all over himself and his bubble perm was now covered in slime with some sweetcorn and carrots buried deep in the curls. His trousers were also covered in his own sick and he had apparently left his shirt in a bar somewhere, when he finally got his trousers on he waved goodbye and mumbled something about seeing us later, then fled down the hillside to get a taxi to the airport where his next group of clientele were already waiting for him, my were they going to be impressed when he turned up.

Steve wasn’t all that impressed when he looked in his bedroom though, his bedsheets were liberally splattered with Dennis’s vomit and there was a hole in his suitcase where Dennis had stood on it while trying to stand upright this morning.